Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.
—Doug Larson, author and humorist
AT THE BEGINNING OF 1992, REPUBLICANS COULD NOT IMAGINE the prospect of a Democratic president. After Jimmy Carter’s failures, the success of Ronald Reagan, and, under George H. W. Bush, the end of the Cold War and the victory in Desert Storm, Republicans began to think of the White House the way Democrats used to think about Congress: it was their personal entitlement. Republicans also assumed that the Democrats would continue to dominate the House, making control of the Oval Office that much more important.
With Bill Clinton in the White House, the Democrats would control both the executive and legislative branches with the prospect that Clinton would get to nominate at least one Supreme Court justice (he named two). This made finding ways to cripple the new president an imperative among the extreme partisans, who by now virtually controlled the GOP. These Republican operatives, who had used Willie Horton to eviscerate Dukakis in 1988, needed ammunition to attack the new president. Bill Clinton gave them plenty.
During the 1992 campaign, Clinton was dogged by allegations of sexual indiscretions, evading the Vietnam-era draft, and, along with his wife, Hillary, exploiting the Arkansas governor’s office for personal financial gain. All of this and much more would provide Republicans with a rich vein of material with which to launch a relentless campaign to destroy Clinton. Republicans would argue that Clinton’s behavior was self-destructive, and they merely pointed it out.
The attack was launched on multiple fronts. They included the Clintons’ involvement in an Arkansas development project called Whitewater, Clinton’s long history of sexual indiscretions, his use of Arkansas State Police officers to facilitate his sexual escapades, and Hillary Clinton’s use of the governor’s office to enhance her private law practice.
The Washington press corps gleefully jumped on the Clinton-bashing bandwagon, proving to some that even though the media is mostly liberal, they are equal-opportunity muckrakers when it comes to a good political scandal. The media wallowed in the Clintons’ misery. Even the liberal New York Times, which had endorsed Clinton, seemed to leave journalistic standards behind in its quest to expose the president and first lady. The scandalmongering became so blatant that the Times lowered itself to reprinting rumors and wild charges by people with questionable motives and suspect reputations. The Times quoted stories that had first appeared in the National Enquirer and other tabloids normally given to fantastic revelations about alien visitations and two-headed women.
Clinton’s troubles were exacerbated by the emergence of conservative talk radio. The Clintons were the ideal targets for the conservative audiences attracted to the new radio format. It could be argued that without Bill and Hillary Clinton, the shows might not have enjoyed the success they have today. (However, we do not expect Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to rush out and thank the former president and first lady.)
By June 1994, the multiple allegations against the Clintons had reached a politically critical stage. With President Clinton’s approval, his attorney general, Janet Reno, appointed an independent counsel to investigate a number of allegations, collectively known as “Whitewater.” Reno named Republican lawyer Robert Fiske, deputy attorney general in the George Bush 41 administration. The Independent Counsel Act (ICA), which had caused so much trouble for both Republicans and Democrats, was about to do so again.
Fiske issued an interim report on Whitewater and intended to release several other conclusions concerning additional allegations. Virtually the same day Fiske published his report, the ICA was reinstated. That wasn’t enough for some conservative Republican senators, who thought Fiske had been far too moderate during his tenure at the Justice Department, so they asked for a new counsel. The judge in charge of the Special Division, the three-judge panel that appointed independent counsels, was David Sentelle. Sentelle was a devout conservative and a close friend of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who was one of the Senate’s most notorious polarizers. The Special Division selected former federal appeals judge for the District of Columbia Kenneth Starr. The choice was controversial, but well within the Special Division’s guidelines for independent counsels. In the several years he was special counsel, Starr would prove to be Clinton’s greatest nemesis and the most controversial independent counsel ever selected under the ICA.
The allegations that dogged Clinton from the beginning of his term did not deter him from pursuing a legislative agenda that flew in the face of the Republican mantra on taxes. Clinton’s first major legislative proposal was an economic plan to deal with the budget deficit that included a tax increase on the top 5 percent of taxpayers. Republicans strongly opposed the proposal.
When the House and Senate voted on Clinton’s economic package not one Republican supported the bill, but Democrats rallied around Clinton, though for many it was a dangerous political vote. They knew the Republicans would use the tax increase against them in the coming midterm elections. Nonetheless, all the Democrats stayed with Clinton’s economic plan, and as a consequence, some were defeated in the 1994 election on their tax-increase vote alone.
That not a single Republican supported the bill was a bigger story than the immediate political fallout. The vote on Clinton’s budget would set a pattern of party-line voting in the House—and to a lesser extent the Senate—that continues today. The days when members voted for local interests over party interests were coming to an end. In the years since 1993, Congress—at least on politically charged issues—has begun to look more like the British Parliament than a representative democracy.
With party-line voting enforced by increasingly partisan leadership in both parties, the negative aspects of a parliamentary system followed. Those downsides are best described in a book written by British authors Michael Schluter and David Lee: The R Factor. In Chapter 9, the two discuss the British system of political confrontation. Many of the same practices and principles in the British system now apply to contemporary American politics.
Consider the similarities: the authors lament the “confrontational style which one finds expressed in the House of Commons” (and in the House and Senate in America), saying that “it is institutionalized in a two-Party [system]” that “leads to sometimes paralyzing discontinuities of policy and not infrequently turns important policy issues like education and health into political footballs. The politicizing does little to benefit the ordinary citizen. Indeed, as a Swahili proverb has it: ‘when the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.’”
After 230 years, the British have found their revenge! What has happened in the American Congress over the last two decades has, indeed, turned important issues into partisan footballs with “little benefit to the ordinary citizen.” It would get worse after 1993.
The extent to which party-line voting is becoming the norm was displayed in the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton. No vote cast in Congress is more important under the Constitution than a vote in the House to impeach a president and one in the Senate to convict and remove a sitting president from office. No president has ever been convicted, but President Andrew Johnson was the first to be impeached. Bill Clinton would be the second.
The vote on Clinton’s impeachment underscores the extent to which polarization had affected politics at the end of the twentieth century. At the time of Clinton’s impeachment, there were 228 Republicans and 206 Democrats in the House. The first article of impeachment on perjury passed 228–206 along straight party lines.
Health Care Reform: Clinton’s Mission Impossible
Bill Clinton’s pledge to reform the American health care system had been the centerpiece of his campaign for the presidency and it became the signature issue of his first term. To underscore the importance of health care reform, Clinton put his wife, Hillary, in charge of the task force that would develop the administration’s plan. If any one initiative could be described as encapsulating all the ills wrought by polarizing politics, it was the Clinton health care reform proposal.
Health care represents 17 percent of the American economy. It encompasses some of the highest-paid professions and employs millions of workers. As a result, the health care industry is well represented in Washington and is a major source of campaign contributions. The industry’s premier advocacy group is the American Medical Association, one of the most powerful and influential in Washington. The AMA is also overwhelmingly Republican, as is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Insurance Association. Both the chamber and the AIA represent huge corporations that provide products and services to the health care industry.
Even before Hillary Clinton convened the first meeting of the health care task force, these massive special-interest groups were planning a campaign to undercut reform. They simply took it for granted that any proposals coming from a Clinton White House would not be in their interest. After all, the status quo was providing enormous profits for the health care industry, much of which came from the federal Medicare and federal-state Medicaid programs. What followed was a textbook example of just how powerful and destructive special interests have become in Washington.
Health care reform gave congressional Republicans an opportunity to derail Clinton’s agenda early in his term. Their message was that the American health care system was the best in the world and any effort to change it significantly was dangerous. They floated the idea that under a Clinton plan, Americans would have to change their primary care doctor, that Clinton wanted health care taken over by the federal government, which would create a “single payer” plan similar to Canada’s. They charged that a Clinton plan would benefit uninsured Americans at the expense of diminished quality of care for those who were covered. All this before Clinton even began to draft a health care reform package!
This frightening message was widely disseminated through a massive advertising campaign paid for by the health care industry. The infamous “Harry and Louise” TV commercials showed a young, white suburban couple holding hands and telling each other that the Clinton health plan would be devastating and would force them to leave their beloved family doctor and not pay for important new medical advances or new breakthrough drugs. Thus, they would be forced to accept either mediocre health care or face the poorhouse if they opted for the best health care.
The ad became a classic and a model for future advocacy advertising on a range of issues (and a potent weapon for polarizers). Political pressure continued to grow, and even health care reform advocates in Congress were getting cold feet. By the time it was sent to Congress, Clinton’s health care reform proposal was DOA—dead on arrival.
By the 1994 midterm election, the Clinton tax increases had passed, but the advertised benefits of the president’s overall economic plan were not yet in place. With Clinton under siege by the independent counsel, Democrats were left with few accomplishments to bring to voters that November. The press and pundits were quick to point out that this lack of productivity was surprising since the Democrats controlled the White House as well as the House and Senate. Was this a “do nothing” Congress (a phrase coined by Harry Truman in his upset election in 1948) or a “can’t do” president, or both?
The election would have historical and unanticipated consequences. Republicans, for the first time since 1952, took control of the House of Representatives, and also regained the Senate for the first time since 1986. The election, the crown jewel of the Republican conservative revolution, was a stunning repudiation of Clinton and the Democrats. The newly elected Republicans, especially in the House, were a very conservative lot and had run their campaigns as much against Clinton as against their respective Democratic opponents. Their unquestioned leader was Newt Gingrich.
Republican Crusaders Successfully Storm the Gates
Like Moses wandering with the ancient Israelites in the wilderness, House Republicans wondered whether they would ever reach the “promised land” of a majority. After forty years in the minority (the same number of years that Moses led the Israelites, so the analogy is apt), Republicans seemed resigned to the prospect of remaining in the minority for decades to come.
At least those ancient Israelites had a leader who told them he knew where he was going. House Republicans had a leader, of sorts: Representative Bob Michel (R-IL), who was an amiable but not a forceful man. To many Republicans, Michel appeared content with his minority leader role. After all, the Democrats allowed him to have a nice office and certain perks, so long as he knew his place and didn’t get too “uppity.”
If this sounds like slaves on the Southern plantations of the nineteenth century, that is exactly how many Republicans felt about their status. Newt Gingrich and his fellow Reaganites believed that their only hope of moving forward was through confrontation, not conciliation, with the Democrats. These conservative firebrands believed Bob Michel’s strategy of going along to get along doomed Republicans to permanent minority status, and no conservative agenda could be enacted under such an arrangement. The confrontational strategies worked, and in 1994 the GOP finally found the promised land.
Now Gingrich and the Republicans had the power. Gingrich was savvy enough to realize that his working majority of Republicans (232) to Democrats (202) was not large enough to carry on an all-out war while simultaneously passing their long-sought conservative agenda. So Gingrich tried to find some areas of consensus with the Democrats. He wasn’t ignorant of the benefits of consensus; Gingrich simply hadn’t been in a position to practice it during the scorched-earth campaign he and the conservative activists waged in their quest to wrest power from the Democrats.
The campaign for Republican power deepened polarization to such an extent that very little, if any, legislation was going to pass the House without bloodshed. Republicans could stick together, steamrolling the Democrats on straight party-line votes, but that strategy was certain to be met with a Clinton veto. The House Democratic leadership, particularly Speaker Tip O’Neill, hated Gingrich. There were precious few Democrats in the House who had any personal, or even professional, relationship with Gingrich, and none trusted him.
Gingrich did try some consensus building with the Democratic Black Caucus on trade with Africa and sanctions against South Africa. Gingrich told us that his motives in these, and a few other instances, were not altogether altruistic. The African free-trade bill was supported by the business community, the source of much GOP campaign money. The South African sanctions bill gave Speaker Gingrich an opportunity to take some of the edge off the antiblack image of the GOP.
Let’s be careful not to be revisionists. Yes, Gingrich sought some consensus, but for the most part he remained the devil incarnate to Democrats. At the same time he was seeking bipartisan consensus on some things, he was ramming his conservative agenda through committees headed by handpicked chairmen, setting up confrontation after confrontation with Bill Clinton.
Conservative think tanks were sprouting up all over Washington. The business lobby finally had a pro-business Congress, and they would go to any lengths to maintain it. Conservative special interests, from the NRA to the National Right to Life Committee, saw an opportunity to push their most polarizing agenda items. Rush Limbaugh was joined by several new conservative talk show hosts, including Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tony Snow (currently the White House press secretary). In 1995, Fox News Channel was launched. It would become the most viewed cable network and arguably the most influential conservative media outlet.
Republican polarizers and their polarizing friends were in power. The Democratic polarizers in Congress (and their polarizing friends) were getting a quick lesson in the guerrilla tactics of the minority. The Democrat-controlled Congress was now gone, but Bill Clinton remained. He was about to become an even larger target for conservative polarizers.